Smithsonian courted Colorado family for its vintage memorabilia

What: Tours and volunteer opportunities at the Vintage Aero Flying Museum featuring World War I aircraft, uniforms and memorabilia. Projects include building and repairing vintage aircraft; designing displays and dioramas; learning to give tours; and sorting donations. Welding, woodworking and painting skills appreciated, but no experience necessary!

When: Anytime between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., most Tuesdays. (Please contact VAFM to discuss projects and how you can help.)

Where: Platte Valley Airpark, 7507 County Road 39, Fort Lupton

More information: To schedule a tour for individuals or groups; volunteer; get specific hangar directions; or make a tax deductible donation, contact Andy Parks, VAFM executive director, at andy@vafm.org. To learn more, please visit www.vafm.org.

Sunday dinners at his grandparents' home in Rapid City, S.D., often attracted a once dangerous band of men — World War I combat veterans from around the country who found each other through the grapevine and then kept in touch.

These mini-reunions gave the guests a soapbox to tell their stories and process their shared experiences, Andy Parks, 54, said of his father's childhood recollections.

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"And for my dad, a kid then reading pulp fiction about the war, it was captivating — like watching a movie at the table," he added.

Long after the meal, the then middle-aged vets moved their conversation to the basement where Fred Parks — Andy Parks' grandfather — showcased a growing collection of memorabilia from the war in a small museum he built.

Part of his grandfather's eventual fascination with and focus on collecting aviation items stemmed from an unrealized dream, Andy Parks explained.

"He fought in World War I with the artillery," he continued. "But he was gassed in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive and invalided out of the war before he could transfer from the artillery into the 166th Aero Squadron's American Expeditionary Forces to join his cousin, Capt. Victor Parks, the squadron commander."

Still, the front row seat on that generation's storytelling inspired Andy Parks' father, Dr. Jim Parks, to carry on the tradition and collect much more memorabilia donated by aviators the family befriended over multiple decades.

Dr. Parks — an obstetrician/gynecologist who practiced in Denver and taught at the University of Colorado — like his father wanted to pay his respects and show hospitality to veterans.

Tom Kooken and Julie Kinder, 17, work Tuesday on a wing for a biplane at the Vintage Aero Flying Museum near Fort Lupton. To view a video and a slideshow visit timescall.com. (Lewis Geyer / Staff Photographer)

"I think they both understood that the vets they visited and invited to visit us were living history. And the ones I met — about half of the pilots represented in the collection today — were like grandpas to me," Andy Parks, now a Highlands Ranch resident, said. "So, our family has a 'personality plus' way of sharing this sliver of distant World War I history."

For that reason, the Smithsonian Institution — the nation's flagship repository in Washington, D.C., for historical American artifacts — came calling a few years back.

"They wanted me to donate our collection, which highlights uniforms and memorabilia from American pilots who flew for the British and the French before U.S. involvement. But we have more than they have, and I told them that they should donate their collection to me," Andy Parks said.

Mike Gugeler, of Erie, welds on a tube frame Tuesday for a biplane at the Vintage Aero Flying Museum near Fort Lupton. To view a video and a slideshow visit timescall.com. (Lewis Geyer / Staff Photographer)

Inside the time capsule

That collection grew considerably in 1981, when Andy Parks' father organized a reunion in Paris attended by 48 World War I aces —fighter pilots from both sides with five or more victories. For this reason, the event drew media coverage from outlets such as the long running American television talk show, "Today," Andy Parks, who often traveled with his father to meet vets at home and abroad, said.

"Around those tables, the pilots said that they knew whenever they shot down another pilot that there would be a mother crying that night," he continued. "It was intimate combat. Sometimes they could see each other's eyes."

Through that gathering in France the Parks family met more vets and collected more uniforms and memorabilia well before the last known World War I vet, an Englishman, died in 2012 at 110.

Besides about 100 uniforms, the collection today includes original art — both by the wildly famous and the relatively obscure.

For instance, one jacket sports a leather squadron insignia patch sketched and hand-colored by Walt Disney, who enlisted — though underage at the time — to serve in World War I's Red Cross Ambulance Corps.

The Parks also acquired a detailed pencil sketch of an aerial dogfight with a three-dimensional perspective from above of planes in death spirals through clouds drawn by William Lambert on Jan. 27, 1918 — the day the Cincinnati native shot down his fifth plane to become an ace with, ultimately, 18 air-to-air victories.

Other memorabilia includes: sterling silver wings pins created by Tiffany and Cartier for high-ranking officers; soft leather trench coats called "teddy bears" for the plush fur lining that kept pilots warm as they flew in open cockpits; and aerial maps glued to plywood.

Because Andy Parks grew up the same way his dad did — with a basement museum honoring vets — he, too, got many closeups with veterans who heard about the collection in Colorado and arrived from all over to view it after corresponding with the family.

"I remember my mom putting up with (ace fighter pilot) Ken Porter asking her to mix a third Boodles martini until she got it right," Andy Parks said. "... And I was old enough then to record interviews my dad or I did with them and just listen in on the conversations. I still remember dad saying, 'Go get that trunk.' And opening the stuff we hadn't sorted yet with them was like opening a time capsule."

New name, new digs

To give the public more access to the collection, Andy Parks used his inheritance after his father died in 2002 to build a more formal museum — now a nonprofit 501(c)(3) named the Vintage Aero Flying Museum and also still known as the LaFayette Foundation.

The international aviation museum today tells bits of both sides of the war's story in the skies from inside a nondescript hangar at the Platte Valley Airpark near Fort Lupton four miles northwest of Hudson and about 40 miles northeast of Denver.

There, volunteers —teenagers to octogenarians from Boulder, Weld, and Arapahoe counties — conduct tours, clean and enhance displays, and build or repair replica vintage aircraft including the Fokker DVII German biplane Andy Parks and his dad built between 1971 and 1978.

"At the Treaty of Versailles there was a line item that required Germany to destroy every one of them except for the 20 it needed to give to each Allied country so that they could study the superior technology then," he said.

Erie resident and volunteer, Mike Gugeler, 60, has helped with building and rebuilding planes within the collection. On Tuesday, he covered wings for an SE5a fighter plane under construction there.

He explained that flying vintage aircraft sometimes feels like driving a car in desperate need of an alignment.

"They pull hard," he said. "So, you could say that we've learned a lot about stability and aerodynamics in the last 100 years."

Another volunteer, Rebecca Kinder of Centennial, said she shows up with her 17-year-old daughter, Julie, to give back and get out of her comfort zone.

"I didn't think I could weld or cover wings," she said. "But the opportunity to learn was here, and it gives me a chance to touch history every time."

Out of the closet

In telling this century-old story, it helps that the uniforms are out of the closet.

Somehow, the mannequins modeling them within the tall glass cases flanking the hangar's mezzanine level humanize World War I.

Instead of displaying random uniforms sewn into history and mostly forgotten there, these threads speak to lives understood with more context given the personal knowledge the Parks family had of the vets who donated them, according to Andy Parks, now the museum's executive director.

Space constraints today prompted the Parks family to exhibit about half of its collection at the Platte Valley Airpark hangar museum and the other half — which concentrates more on World War II aviation history — at the Pueblo Weisbrod Aircraft Museum in Pueblo, he noted.

Yet, the cramped hangar exhibit still pulls a strong thread through this momentous era.

For most of these characters, their story begins in the same way — by volunteering to fly for the Allies before the U.S. officially engaged in World War I in April 1917.

"These pilots weren't usual soldiers of fortune," Andy Parks said during a museum tour. "They were men often from prominent families like the Vanderbilt family who didn't want their assets in Europe threatened by an aggressor."

For instance, the museum features the uniform of John Stetson of Stetson hat fame for volunteering to fly as a fighter pilot for the Allies and being forced instead to teach pilots due to his old age of 33.

The estate of James Norman Hall — coauthor in 1932 of "Mutiny on the Bounty" (Little, Brown and Company) — also donated his uniform.

Others with humble beginnings stand out, too. Eddie Rickenbacker, dubbed "Ace of Aces," dropped out of school in seventh grade.

Eugene Bullard is another underdog featured in the collection for being the first black American fighter pilot in combat.

Institutional racism kept him from flying with the Americans when the U.S. entered World War I. But before then, he flew with the French and became known as the "Black Swallow of Death."

"Today, there's almost a fear of military collections, like it's wrong to focus on this history because it glorifies war," Andy Parks said, glancing at the array of mannequins on the mezzanine before getting back to work on aircraft parked below.

"No. We are not glorifying war. We are glorifying the personal sacrifices made by young people and remembering what they did so there would be no more war. I know for a fact that every one of these guys — if they could —would say that they hated what they saw and did to keep the next generation from having to do it again."

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